centuries before the Neanderthal, Piltdown, Heidelberg and the 

 Trinil held sway in turn, but long since have also been obliterated 

 by causes that have not yet been determined. It may be that the 

 stock ran out, that epidemics, wars or climatic changes may have 

 had the same destructive influences upon primitive man as we see 

 now at work before our very eyes. 



Superficial study of Australia and Polynesia, will show the fast 

 progressing disappearance of native races, which were numerous and 

 strong a hundred years ago. The more rapid elimination of typical 

 aboriginal culture, however, is to be observed in the brief period of 

 the last fifty years from the Atlantic to the Pacific Coast of the 

 United States. 



Excepting in the case of the Navajos, which is unique, our whole 

 Indian population is decreasing and in many cases certain tribes have 

 absolutely disappeared. It is but logical to assume that the same 

 conditions prevailed in the misty past of prehistory. 



The two features common to all the prehistoric races are their 

 stature and their brain capacity. The average height of modern man 

 is five feet, seven inches. While the Cro-Magnon reached, in many 

 cases, five feet ten, and six feet, all his primitive ancestors were of 

 about the same height as our own, ranging from five feet three inches 

 to five feet ten inches. In brain capacity we find the dominant 

 feature. Man's bony structure has gradually become much lighter 

 and less ponderous, the lower jaw has very materially changed in size 

 and weight; the skull capacity has been affected by the muscular 

 changes associated with that metamorphosis, producing a brain ca- 

 pacity of 1400 to 1500 C.C.M. in modern man which rapidly recedes 

 "to 1350 for the Brunn race, 1250 for the Neanderthal, 1000 for the 

 Trinil. 



Such a very brief survey of the subject as this, does not permit 

 dwelling on the progress of culture adn its aesthetic phases, like the 

 so-called Magdalenian and Aurignacian cultures of the Cro-Magnon 

 races, which were the fore-runners of our graphic and plastic arts in 

 the Reindeer period. We desire, at this time, to limit ourselves to a 

 survey of modern knowledge of the more essential human skeletal 

 evidence, places and dates of discovery. 



In 1891, a skeleton was discovered at Brunn, Morovia, deeply 

 embedded along with bones of the woolly mammoth. It was first 

 described by Makowsky, who himself had discovered in the same 

 neighborhood, a fragmentary skull known under the name of Brunn 

 II. Interest which this find created, at the time, established the 

 similarity of form with another skullcap, discovered in 1871, in the 

 course of coal mining at Brux, Bohemia, which was in the collection 

 of the Royal Museum of Vienna. 



Since then a burial place has been discovered at Predmost, Mor- 

 avia, from which fragments of over fourteen skeletons have been 

 gathered. The chief distinction of the skulls is that they are ex- 

 tremely elongated, the forehead quite modern and the contours of 

 the face more harmonious than in the preceding races: the artifects 



